Author: bookramblings142

Just My Type – Simon Garfield

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This fascinating book delves into the almost six hundred years of typesetting from Gutenberg with his introduction and popularisation of movable type on the printing press that he invented in the late 1440’s to the modern computer generated pages; whilst discussing the history and development of typefaces and fonts which have grown to well over 100,000 different styles over the centuries. One particular feature of the book is the use of the font referred to for most occasions that a specific font is discussed. This has led to almost two hundred different fonts being used in the book from the black lettering used by Gutenberg and Caxton which looks like the letters produced by monks in handwritten documents and books from the previous centuries to surprisingly recent classic examples which have become ubiquitous such as Helvetica (1957) which has become the font of choice for American transport systems, to its near copy Arial (1982). Arial was deliberately created by the Monotype Corporation to be very similar to Helvetica owned by their rival Linotype and owes its spread to being bundled by Microsoft from Windows 3.1 because the license was cheaper than Helvetica. There is also a chapter on the font developed by Herbert Spenser and Margaret Calvert for British road signs in the 1960’s and which has now spread across Europe, the name of the font is appropriately Transport.

I think anyone with an interest in books develops a parallel interest in fonts especially when the publisher, such as The Folio Society, always includes a reference to the chosen font at the start of the book. We don’t always notice when the choice is done well but certainly do when it is done badly. This is sadly the case with a book I am struggling with currently despite the contents being really interesting the poor paper quality, which is a little grey, along with the faint small thin font utilised makes reading more than a dozen or so pages in one go impossible due to the eye strain resulting from the attempt, Papyrus by Irene Vallejo published in paperback by Hodder & Stoughton is going to have to wait for it’s time on this blog, the subject is great but the reading experience is painful.

Garfield refers to many books about printing in this volume, several of which are now on my wants list including an interesting double book by Paul Felton which started from one direction is called ‘The Ten Commandments of Typography’ but turn it round and start from the other end it becomes ‘Type Heresy’. Amongst the commandments is “Thou shalt not apply more than three typefaces in a document” something that ‘Just My Type’ breaks for excellent reasons. But in ‘Type Heresy’ there is a full page rebuttal to this argument.

Oddly Profile Books who published this volume categorise it as ‘Reference/Humour’ which I think is simply down to the inclusion of this cartoon.

Vincent Connare who created Comic Sans whilst working for Microsoft as a font designer in 1994 is used to the criticism of his best known font design, but all he was trying to do was come up with an approachable design which resembled simple handwriting and was based on the handwritten lettering used in comic books by Marvel and DC at the time hence the name. It is worth noting that Comic Sans, the Sans indicating that it doesn’t have serifs (a small addition to the lines making up the character) on the letters, is particularly popular with teachers of dyslexic children due to its simple nonthreatening style.

The book covers a wide spectrum of fonts and typographical examples from histories of specific fonts in short chapters interleaved within the main text and each entitled Fontbreak, which starts with Eric Gill’s best known font Gill Sans (1928). Through to The John Bull Printing Outfit which I’m pretty certain I never owned although I do remember using something similar as a child to typeset short documents and print my own items. There is also a chapter on the worst fonts in the world which includes the truly awful font designed for the 2012 London Olympics.

So what font am I using for this blog? Well it’s the now somewhat unfashionable Times New Roman, chosen for the same reason that it was developed, to be clear and easy to read even down to small sizes, after all you may well be reading this on your phone. Times New Roman was created by Stanley Morrison in the early 1930’s to improve the legibility of The Times newspaper in Britain which up until then had used the somewhat spindly letters standard across most newspapers since the 19th century. The thickening of the very narrow letters also improved the robustness off the cast metal type, particularly useful given the high speed rotary presses in use.

When You are Old: Early Poems and Fairy Tales – W B Yeats

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This collection of Yeats’ early works is split roughly 50/50 between his poems and other works including the play ‘The Land of Hearts Desire’ and selections from ‘Irish Folk Tales’, ‘The Celtic Twilight’, John Sherman and Dhota’ and ‘Stories of Red Hanrahan’. There are eighty eight poems split into four categories by subject including the work that gives this collection its title, ‘When You are Old’.

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Yeats would come to look back on his early works with distaste as he regarded his more mature works as far superior and in the original preface of this collection he made clear that he thought the works that were cut were not worth retaining.

The first poem mentioned above ‘The Wanderings of Usheen’, more commonly titled ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ is the longest poem included in the collection and takes up 35 of the 158 pages dedicated to poetry. I love the rhythm of this poem and despite its length it is actually quite an easy read and takes the form of a conversation between the legendary hero Usheen/Oisin and Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, although it is somewhat one sided with Saint Patrick barely managing to get a word in. It tells the story of Oisin’s journey into the land of Faerie and his wanderings with the fairy princess Niamh there for the last three hundred years. A small extract from the first section of the poem will give some idea of the work.

But now the moon like a white rose shone
In the pale west, and the sun’s rim sank,
And clouds arrayed their rank on rank
About his fading crimson ball:
The floor of Emen’s hosting hall
Was not more level than the sea,
As full of loving phantasy,
And with low murmurs we rode on,
Where many a trumpet-twisted shell
That in immortal silence sleeps
Dreaming of her own melting hues,
Her golds, her ambers, and her blues,
Pierced with soft light the shallowing deeps.
But now a wandering land breeze came
And a far sound of feathery quires;
It seemed to blow from the dying flame,
They seemed to sing in the smouldering fires.

One thing I didn’t realise until I read this collection and recognised the words, is that one of my favourite tracks by Irish band The Chieftains uses one of Yeats’ poems for the lyrics, beautifully read by Brenda Fricker, ‘Never give all the heart‘.

Leaving the poetry behind and delving into the second half of the book took me to totally unfamiliar territory as I had only read Yeats’ poetic works before. The one play included here has us yet again dealing with a character from the land of Faerie, this time the fairy is tempting a newly married woman to join her and leave the mortal realm. Following that is a very short and disappointing because of that, extract from the 1891 ‘Irish Fairy Tales’ which seems to just consist of an introduction and the enjoyable ‘Appendix: Classification of Irish Fairies’ this starts off with the largely friendly Sociable Fairies and then goes deeper into the mainly disagreeable Solitary Fairies. The brevity of this section makes me want to hunt out the complete book and read the actual folk tales told within it.

The next extract from a book, this time ‘The Celtic Twilight’ is at over forty pages quite a bit more representative than the handful of pages given to ‘Irish Fairy Tales’, it consists of a series of essays dealing with fairies, ghosts and other such supernatural characters and their encounters with humans. These essays are quite short, often just a single page but explore the myths of the Irish people with tales either told to Yeats or experienced by him. The selection from ‘John Sherman and Dhoya’ is again very short being just concerned with the story of Dhoya a giant mortal living alone who attracts the attention of a fairy lady who decides to become his companion until she is taken away by a male of her own folk leaving him alone again and inconsolable. Like ‘Irish Fairy Tales’ I’d like to read more of these stories as the taster is too brief. The final selection is actually complete and includes the six short stories concerning Red Hanrahan that were published together in 1897. These tell tales of Hanrahan’s, often ill-fated, encounters with women and supernatural beings.

If you want to get a representative overview of early works by William Butler Yeats then this collection would be a great place to start and like myself you will probably end up wanting more, especially of the prose works. This is the fourth book from the Penguin Drop Caps series I have written about along with a general overview of the series. There are twenty six in total, one author per letter of the alphabet and previously I have covered Ellery Queen, John Steinbeck and Xinran.

Cranes Flying South – Nikolay Karazin

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I knew nothing of this book or indeed its author before I picked up this copy a few days ago and there are no biographical details within the book either so onto the internet. Nikolay Karazin was a Russian soldier, artist and author of several books who was born in 1842 and died in 1908, he wrote and painted after retiring from the army and it is for his artwork that he is probably best known nowadays. I suspect the cover illustration is by him although no artist is credited. The English translation, by M.Pokrovsky, of his children’s book Cranes Flying South was first published in 1936 and this is the 1948 Puffin first edition. The book tells the story of the crane’s migration from the Ostashkovo marshes in north western Russia about halfway between Moscow and St Petersburg all the way over eastern Europe and Egypt following the Blue Nile to beyond Khartoum in Sudan, told from the point of view of a bird making his first long distance flight, as the book starts with him and his sister hatching.

His father, Clarion Trumpeter, is quite senior in the military like hierarchy supposed by Karazin to be normal in a colony of cranes especially during the migrations and in this he imposes his background. The story has them flying in structured triangles, which indeed they do, but regarding the stops on the way as camps with posted sentries and the discussions between senior cranes as to the best way to advance is rather more fanciful but does make for a good story. Amongst the other major characters is the Trifler, a crane known for his outrageously tall tales of his adventures and the leader of the colony Longnose the Wise. We never learn the name of our narrator or his sister, or indeed their mother but we are introduced to some of the cranes from another colony based in the Urals who join up as part of the massive flock taking part in the migration. On the way they also meet herons and storks both of which are regarded as inferior to the cranes, herons for their appetite as they will eat pretty well anything unlike the largely vegetarian cranes and storks for their relationship with man whilst cranes regard men as dangerous.

The journey south is full of incidents both with men hunting and also with bad weather which causes the loss of several cranes over open water when they get so exhausted by the buffeting winds but can find nowhere to safely land as cranes cannot swim. The descriptions of the route are also fascinating both the long slow journey over Russia and Ukraine then onto the mouth of the Danube before deciding to either cross the Mediterranean via a rest stop on Cyprus or skirting the coast from Turkey, Syria and Lebanon on their way to the Nile delta. Karazin had clearly read up on the ornithological knowledge at the time regarding the routes taken by cranes which seems to be largely correct according to the data I can find online. One particularly fun bit is near the end:

There are unimaginative persons unable to rise above the commonplace, who are generally very fond of ‘investigating’ things.
I am quite certain that several such persons, on reading of my travels will say: ‘How could he write it, when cranes have no ink and no paper?’
Such a remark will show, to say the least, a total lack of humour.

The book follows the full migration both to and from Sudan back to the breeding grounds in the Ostashkovo marshes and we get the full circle of life with our narrator pairing up with Blackneck, a crane originally from the Ural colony, and them having their own chicks. Sadly the book appears to be out of print but is quite easy to find second hand, it’s a lovely children’s story and worth seeking out.

Zulaikha – Niloufar-Lily Soltani

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Canadian author Soltani’s first novel takes us to her Iranian heritage with a powerful story exploring the life of the fictional Zulaikha (pronounced Zuli-ka), born in 1945 and therefore exposed to the various changes that have overtaken Iran in the last seventy plus years including the suppression of female rights since the Islamic Revolution at the end of the 1970’s. Not that Zulaikha’s life had been particularly rosy even before the revolution and the subsequent Iran-Iraq war in the 1980’s. From being pulled out of school in 1958 at the age of thirteen because as her mother, Madineh, saw it “no man would marry a girl with an education”, her role was to get married and her wishes were seen as unimportant. The book however starts in December 2007 and in Amsterdam rather than Iran. Sixty two year old Zulaikha has been visiting her son, who now lives in The Netherlands and at Schiphol airport on the way back to Tehran she meets Kia, a man she hasn’t seen since the 1960’s. There is no hint as to the relationship between them other than he used to know her missing brother Hessam, in this opening chapter, we slowly find out more as the book progresses but the two of them meeting triggers a postponement of their flight and security take Zulaikha away for questioning. Who is this man and why should their chance meeting be seen as a cause of concern? We find out the who eventually but we are left in suspense as to what will happen to Zulaikha when she returns to Iran the next day as the book leaps backward to 1958 and begins a chronological narrative until we eventually get back to the plane landing.

Soltani gives her protagonist a difficult time, from being a child bride as the second wife of a merchant in Bahrain whom she only meets just before the wedding, to becoming a widow whilst still only seventeen and returning to Iran where she ends up having an abortion after a doomed illicit relationship. Zulaikha grows up in Abadan, home to what was at one time the largest oil refinery in the world and crucially close to the border with Iraq which made it a prime target in the 1980’s Iran-Iraq war, so much so that the population plummeted from around 300,000 in 1980 to just 6 in 1985 and Zulaikha along with her family and most of the population of the city became refugees in Tehran and it is in 1985 that Hessam vanishes, presumed killed on the front line. She also spends time in the notorious Evin prison but despite the hardships piled onto Zulaikha the narrative drive of the story keeps you reading, indeed it’s a difficult book to put down you just want to know more of her story. It is also a book that is clearly well researched with many real events explored, such as the Abadan Cinema Rex fire in 1978 which killed over four hundred people and became one of the turning points in the overthrow of the Shah with rumours blaming his secret police force despite the barring of the doors and subsequent arson actually being perpetrated by Islamic militants. I learnt so much more Iranian history through reading this novel.

The book first came out at the end of 2023 in Canada although it is now available more widely and it is definitely worth seeking out, it is beautifully written and the story of the ups and downs of Zulaikha’s life is engrossing with the various threads largely tied up by the end but you still want to know more about Zulaikha which is a good place to leave her story. This blog is being published on Tuesday 19th March and the Iranian new year is marked on the first day of Spring, this Thursday 21st March so Happy New Year to any of my readers whom are celebrating this, or in Farsi Nowruz Mobarak.

Worrals of the W.A.A.F. – Capt. W E Johns

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William Earl Johns is best known as the creator of James Bigglesworth, better known as Biggles, who featured in ninety eight books of adventure stories. Joan Worralson, aka Worrals, on the other hand appeared in just eleven books and the first three were finally republished in 2013 by Indiebooks after a long period out of print. Whilst it’s good to see these stories back in print I think it’s a pity that the cover illustrations are so childish with Worrals and Frecks depicted as apparently far younger than their actual age in the book which is eighteen and seventeen respectively. With that in mind I think I prefer the original dust wrapper from the first edition in 1941, although in that picture Worrals looks more in her early twenties.

W E Johns adopted the title Captain for his writing career although he never achieved that rank during actual service as a fighter pilot and later a flying instructor during WWI. Remaining in the R.A.F. after the war he was promoted to Flying Officer in 1920 whilst working as a recruiting officer, ultimately transferring to the reserves in 1927 before finally relinquishing his commission in 1931. The following year he wrote his first Biggles book ‘The Camels are Coming’, the title referring to the Sopwith Camel biplane rather than the bad tempered quadruped. His long career in the air force obviously informed his detailed descriptions of flying and the aircraft used, and you can be pretty sure that if Johns says a plane handles a specific way then it really did. The Women’s Auxiliary Air Force which had both Worrals and Betty Lovell, aka Frecks due to her freckled face, as members was founded in 1939 and during WWII it’s members performed various support roles to the R.A.F. including transferring aircraft between airfields and repair sites although this was a relatively uncommon function, most were employed in far more mundane duties. Worrels is therefore highly unusual in performing this task as this was actually a job for the Air Transport Auxiliary which eventually did employ around 100 women, but as a recruiting agent she apparently worked well.

The story begins with Worrals receiving a dressing down by the Squadron Leader for having gone out on a short training flight in a Reliant in contravention of standing orders which did not permit females to fly combat aircraft and she is to be punished along with the Flying Officer who flew with her by loss of leave and in his case a transfer to a forward airfield. Shortly afterwards the Squadron Leader rather shamefacedly asked her to fly the same plane as it needed moving and apparently with the transfer of Bill he had nobody left who had previously flown that make. All rather unlikely but it is really just a device to get Worrals, and Frecks as a passenger up in the air where they spotted a mysterious aircraft and received a general all planes message on the radio that it needed stopping. As the only plane in the vicinity Worrals engaged the other plane and luckily shot it down but not before seeing it swoop low over what appeared to be a golf course. If flying a combat aircraft without specific authorisation wasn’t bad enough before, then actually partaking in combat was very much forbidden, however Worrals managed to talk herself out of further punishment by pointing out that she was flying the only combat plane that had seen the mystery aircraft and otherwise it might have escaped. Worrals not only avoids further censure but gets her weekend leave reinstated.

Worrals decides to use her leave to do some unofficial investigation as she doesn’t think she was taken seriously over the activity at the golf course so taking Frecks with her they head off to the property only to be captured by German spies and the plot unfolds as they slowly work out what is happening during bouts of freedom as they alternatively escape and get recaptured a few times. The plot is well thought out and Johns certainly provides plenty of tension as the two women engage in a battle of wits with the Germans and although a few escapades somewhat stretch the readers credulity I had to remember that I was not the target readership which was largely teenage girls and young women during the war. Having said that I nevertheless enjoyed my first experience of Worrals, but I doubt I’ll read another. I read a lot of Biggles at around the age of ten and I can’t see me rereading any of those either. It was fun though and if you like what is now called Young Adult adventure stories then W E Johns has a lot to recommend him. Please be aware though that the books are very much of their time and although Worrals is largely UK based in all her books, Biggles travelled the world and often had a very 1930’s/40’s attitude to the people he found there.

With thanks to The Ironbridge Bookshop for the loan of the book so that I could try a Worrals rather than reading my extremely delicate and worryingly rare Penguin edition of Biggles Flies Again

Mathematical Games – Martin Gardner

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This week I’m going to cover not one but five books, all of which started life as articles in Scientific American under the heading of Mathematical Games. This column was originated by Martin Gardner in 1956 and I first came across it in my school library in the early 1970’s and became hooked, looking forward to the next monthly issue, which fortunately the school subscribed to. Eventually Gardner compiled fourteen books based on the column, five of which I own.

The first book has an unfolded flexagon alongside a mobius strip and immediately highlights the cover design issues with the Pelican editions in that although flexagons are the subject of the first chapter, the curious single-sided mobius strip is not referenced in this book. Flexagons were in fact the subject of the very first article Gardner wrote for Scientific American and are constructed by folding a strip of paper in a triangular pattern until you create a hexagon which when manipulated, or flexed, opens out and then returns to a hexagon shape but with different sides displayed. So if the user had coloured the original two visible sides these would disappear and new blank faces appear. It is possible to create flexagons with large numbers of faces but the number is always divisible by three. The book describes how to make a couple of different variations and I remember having great fun playing with them. Other chapters include the mathematical game of Hex, an overview of the puzzles created by American Sam Loyd, card tricks (Gardner was a keen magician as well as mathematics writer) and random collections of short puzzles which would be a staple of Mathematical Games columns and their successors in Scientific American.

The second book has a cover that is entirely from the imagination of the designer, in this case Denise York, as it has nothing to do with anything in the book which does however have an article about the five platonic solids one of which this definitely isn’t. Again we have an article about a great historical puzzle maker in this case the English near contemporary of Sam Loyd, Henry Ernest Dudeney, there are also discussions of three dimensional tangrams, magic squares, recreational topology and even origami. Like all the books I have each chapter is reprinted in the book and an addendum is added covering items that were raised after the publication of each column, sometimes pointing out things that were incorrect. Gardner surprisingly wasn’t a mathematician, or an academic, he was just fascinated by mathematical puzzles. Two of the people that continued the mathematics column in Scientific American after he retired in 1979 were professors Douglas Hafstadter and Ian Stewart.

The first two books were published by Pelican in the mid 1960’s but the next time they printed one of Gardner’s books was another pair, this time in 1977 and 1978. Again the the covers are not relevant to the text with the ancient puzzle of the Tower of Hanoi on the cover of Further Mathematical Diversions although this was in fact covered in the first book ‘Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions’ but this third Pelican title does have some of my favourite columns in it starting with the paradox of the unexpected hanging where the judge pronounces on the Saturday of the judgement that:

The hanging will take place at noon, on of of the seven days of next week but you will not know which day it is until you are informed on the morning of the day of the hanging.

The prisoner is despondent but his lawyer is pleased as he reasons that the sentence cannot be carried out because he cannot be executed on the Saturday as that is the last possible day and therefore he would know on the Friday that he was to be executed that day. Likewise it can’t be the Friday as Saturday is impossible so Friday is the last day and so on working back through the week. The logic is fine and worked right up until Thursday when the man was unexpectedly hung. The discussion on why the logic fails is quite entertaining.

Also in this book are articles on the transcendental number e, the properties of rotations and reflections, gambling, chessboard problems and numerous other subjects including the inevitable sets of nine short problems, but my favourite, because it prompted me to attempt to build one was about a ‘computer’ built of matchboxes and beads which could ‘play’ noughts and crosses (ticktacktoe) in fact the original article that this chapter was based on first appeared in Penguin Science Survey, a publication I was unaware of at the time I first read this article. The machine is more of a simple learning machine than a true computer but using three hundred matchboxes it is possible to have something that gradually optimises how to play the game and in the example described it was winning, or at least not losing the majority of games after just twenty goes.

The fourth book again doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the cover illustration but does have various articles including Pascal’s Triangle, infinities that are bigger than other infinities, the art of Dutch artist M.C. Escher, random numbers and a ‘simple’ proof that it is impossible to trisect an angle using just a compass and ruler although bisection is extremely easy. There are again many other subjects covered although unlike the other volumes there isn’t a chapter of nine short puzzles. I remember being fascinated by aleph-null and aleph-one infinities when I first read this piece as a teenager, the concept of ‘countable’ and ‘uncountable’ series resulting in differing ‘sizes’ of infinities was so different to what I was being taught in mathematics at the time that I needed to read it a couple of times to get my head around what was being explained and I have of course come to love the art of M.C. Escher.

The final book I have by Gardner is a hardback published by Allen Lane rather than paperback Pelicans although both are imprints of Penguin Books. It follows much the same format as the other four with twenty chapters based on articles from Scientific American but this time I don’t remember reading many of these before but topics include such diverse subjects as Fibonacci and cyclic numbers, the Turing test, devised by Alan Turing to determine if a machine could fool a human into believing they were conversing with another human. The smallest cyclic number is one that I have always remembered and it is 142,857, what makes it cyclic well just multiply it by 1 to 6 and see that the digits remain in the same order just starting from a different place i.e.

  • 142857 x 1 = 142857
  • 142857 x 2 = 285714
  • 142857 x 3 = 428571
  • 142857 x 4 = 571428
  • 142857 x 5 = 714285
  • 142857 x 6 = 857142

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the mental workout reading these books again this week and remembering oddities of mathematics that have stuck with me since my teenage years and if you have any liking for puzzles I heartily recommend searching out Martin Gardner’s extensive output.

Adolf Hitler My Part in his Downfall – Spike Milligan

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Spike Milligan’s memoirs of his time in D Battery of the 56th Heavy Artillery during World War 2 are as he says in the preface accurate “All the salient facts are true, I have garnished some of them in my own manner, but the basic facts are, as I say, true”. I would say that most of the ‘garnishing’ is down to hindsight allowing more humour to come through than was probably the case at the time. Milligan kept a diary right trough his service years and kept in touch with many of the men he served with over the following years, not just at the annual D Battery dinner which he attended regularly, but also to cross-reference his own memories. He therefore used to get very annoyed with critics who, especially in the later volumes, accused him of making things up. The preface also says that it was planned to be a trilogy although ultimately he wrote seven volumes, of which I have the first four which cover his active service and were all written in the 1970’s. The remaining books “Where Have all the Bullets Gone?” (1985), “Goodbye Soldier” (1986) and “Peace Work” (1991) deal with his time being hospitalised after being wounded at Monte Cassino through to eventually being demobbed and the early days of his career in entertainment building on his skills honed as a trumpeter and guitar player in the battery, and later the NAAFI, bands.

This volume deals with the events from the outbreak of war in September 1939 through joining his regiment in June 1940 to his arrival in Algiers in January 1943. As you can tell from these dates he spent a large part of the war at various camps along the south east coast of England before finally being posted to North Africa to see active service where he worked as a signaller for the battery. As you would expect from a comedy writer of Milligan’s ability the stories of his military experiences are told with humour as are his various attempts at relationships with the opposite sex, some successful others less so, never rising above the dizzy heights of lance bombardier, and that only whilst in Europe, somewhat cramped his style with the ladies whom tended to prefer the officer class if available but he does document a few successes and their aftermath, the following section covers a couple of those successes and also gives a hint as to the style of the rest of the book.

“have been having it off in the back of a lorry, and I got carried away”. He doesn’t explain how Sergeant Hughes managed to get back from Hastings, presumably he didn’t care.

There are also a lot of descriptions of the banality of life in camp and the things that were done in order to relieve the boredom all of which are highly entertaining to read about. Milligan got jankers (disciplined for breach of regulations, usually being confined to barracks and assigned various menial jobs) on more than one occasion and describes his first punishment in the book. He was attempting to get coal up to his first floor barrack room by means of a bucket on a rope with the assistance of his good friend Harry Edgington, who loaded the bucket from the stores however this was on a day when fires were not permitted when there was a surprise inspection. Spike therefore stopped hauling on the rope but Harry misinterpreting this sudden pause yanked on the rope and pulled Spike backwards out of the window which was a bit of a giveaway.

A later section, on board the troop ship approaching Algeria gives a hint of the sort of humour that would make Spike Milligan famous whilst writing The Goon Show scripts for the BBC in the 1950’s with their lunatic extensions of logic.

It has been great fun reading this memoir again and I’m now inspired to read the other three that I have. I suspect the three final post active service volumes will be quite a bit darker as they will have to deal with his ongoing problems with mental health which saw him hospitalised several times.

The Mystery of Orcival – Emile Gaboriau

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Emile Gaboriau is largely forgotten now, especially in English translation, but he was a near contemporary of Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle and his detective Monsieur Lecoq who appears in five novels and one short story by Gaboriau along with four novels by other writers all produced after Gaboriau’s untimely death at the age of just thirty six in 1873. Indeed Gaboriau was well enough known for Doyle to refer to him directly in the very first appearance of Holmes in the novel ‘A Study in Scarlet’ in 1887.

“Have you read Gaboriau’s works?” I asked. “Does Lecoq come up to your idea of a detective?”

Sherlock Holmes sniffed sardonically. “Lecoq was a miserable bungler,” he said, in an angry voice; “he had only one thing to recommend him, and that was his energy. That book made me positively ill. The question was how to identify an unknown prisoner. I could have done it in twenty-four hours. Lecoq took six months or so. It might be made a text-book for detectives to teach them what to avoid.”

A Study in Scarlet – Arthur Conan Doyle

Watson is upset at having two of his favourite detective writers dismissed as such amateurs, Gaboriau’s Lecoq along with Edgar Allen Poe’s Dupin

I felt rather indignant at having two characters whom I had admired treated in this cavalier style. I walked over to the window, and stood looking out into the busy street. “This fellow may be very clever,” I said to myself, “but he is certainly very conceited.”

A Study in Scarlet – Arthur Conan Doyle

To be fair to Holmes Lecoq is certainly an unusual character even wearing disguises at work so that his enemies, presumably people he has prosecuted and their associates, cannot find him to exact revenge “I have been a detective fifteen years, and no one at the prefecture knows either my true face or the colour of my hair.” He is clearly very intelligent and like Holmes sees inferences in the slightest clue which enables him to leap ahead of the other people on the case, what he lacks is a Watson where the conversations between the two keep the reader up to date with the plot. I enjoyed my first encounter with Lecoq in this his second novel although I also own a copy of his first appearance ‘L’Affaire Lerouge’ so I doubt it will be my only dalliance with this early policeman, and indeed the first time in fiction of a French detective. 

If I have one criticism of the novel it is the sudden appearance of a lot of back story, which in my copy starts on page 109 and runs until page 195, almost a third of the entire novel, and which kills the entertaining narrative up until then, effectively providing a pause in the story. This would probably have been better handled in an earlier part of the novel rather than pull the reader back to a time before the various crimes have been committed and deal with the relationships between the various characters, some of which are already dead by the time this extra information is provided. The sheer length of this section became frustrating as up until then the story had proceeded apace but suddenly we became bogged down in apparently irrelevant details, some of which do prove to be extremely relevant later. Yes we need this information to make full sense of the story but I don’t think it needed to be done in this way. This however is my only criticism of the novel, the various twists, that are revealed are very well done and whilst the reader can congratulate themselves in spotting the main suspect very early on the fact that this is confirmed just ninety pages in shows that you are probably supposed to work out the original protagonists according the provincial justice department were just red herrings.

The story when it eventually restarts at the case in hand is just as fast moving and ingenious as it was previously with Lecoq in control of chasing down the murderer whilst also willing to bend the law to protect the woman he is with, who would surely otherwise be dragged through the courts with her honour besmirched unnecessarily. Apart from the slow mid section of the novel I greatly enjoyed this early detective story from the 1860’s and Gaboriau was clearly an extremely capable pioneer of the genre who deserves to be far better known today than he is.

Haiku & Lips too Chilled – Matsuo Bashō

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A Japanese poem of seventeen syllables, in three lines of five, seven, and five, traditionally evoking images of the natural world.

Oxford reference

Almost certainly the master, and certainly the best known outside Japan, of the Japanese poetry style known as haiku is Bashō, a poet who lived from 1644 to 1694 and produced the most elegant works in this form. However as can be seen from the definition of haiku it is an extremely difficult poetic style to translate as in theory to do it properly the translator has not only to render the meaning of the poem but also to express it in the syllable limitations. Which between two such different languages as Japanese and English, or indeed any of the ‘western’ languages, adds an extra level of complexity to the task which frankly could destroy the meaning.

The two short volumes I have of Bashō’s poetry are both by Penguin although published twenty years apart, one to mark sixty years of Penguin Books (in 1995) and the other eighty (2015). They are both extracts from the Penguin Classics volume ‘On Love and Barley: Haiku of Bashō’ originally published in 1985 and translated by Lucian Stryk a Polish born American poet and professor of English at Northern Illinois University. This book has six haiku on each page and has sixty one pages of poetry so just over 360 poems in all. whilst ‘Haiku’ has a wonderful austerity of design with just one poem per page over sixty pages and ‘Lips too Chilled’ has two per page over fifty six pages. There is surprisingly little duplication between the two short books so I have somewhere around 150 haiku by Bashō which admittedly is still well short of half of his output but allows for an appreciation of his work. Stryk does sometimes attempt to stick to the rigid format of haiku but is quite happy to divert from this where the sense of the poem would be lost in translation, which I think is a perfectly fair way to approach the rendering between the two languages as I would much rather appreciate the meaning of the poets words than suffer the pedantic imposition of form. Let’s explore a little of the poets work in the title poem from the 2015 volume:

Lips too chilled
for prattle –
autumn wind

Not perhaps his finest work, I prefer:

Storming over
Lake Nio; whirlwinds
of cherry blossom

As with that I can picture the scene and the paucity of words adds a starkness to the image which would be lost with a longer form. So who was Matsuo Bashō? Well as I mentioned at the beginning he lived in the second half of the 15th century in Japan and as is common in the far east his first name (Matsuo) is his family name. Bashō is not even his real given name as he was born Matsuo Kinsaku, he took the name Bashō from the Japanese banana plant outside the hut built for him by his followers in the later part of 1675 as by then he was already a well known poet and this hut clearly inspired him.

New Year – the Bashō-Tosei
hermitage
a-buzz with haiku

Bashō is also well known in Japan as a traveller making many long walks, usually alone despite the dangers of bandits. But his best known walk, taking 150 days and covering roughly 2,400km (around 1,500 miles) was done in 1689 with one of his students and inspired his great travel book ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’, which when it was published posthumously further embellished the master’s fame.

Journey’s end –
still alive, this
autumn evening

Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne

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I could have sworn I read this book as a child, but as I continued reading nothing came back to my memory, of course I knew the basic plot, but as it is a very well known work I could have picked that up at any time however the more I read the less I recognised and I loved the full story. So how come I have clearly never read this before?

The base story, as I think everybody knows, is that Phileas Fogg, a man who notoriously goes nowhere other than to his home or club and whom is so punctual and set in his habits that you could set a watch by his movements raises the subject of the possibility of travelling around the world in just eighty days. When other members of the Reform Club are incredulous he agrees to wager the massive sum of £20,000 (£1.8 million in today’s money) that he can make such a journey and whats more without any prior planning for he will leave from the card game they are playing immediately. I also knew that he arrives back in London having been delayed and believes he has taken eighty one days and is financially ruined but is rescued by having crossed the international date line in an easterly direction and therefore has gained a day’s grace so makes it back to the club just in time. That is all I knew when I started the book, I had assumed that some travel disaster had occurred to delay him and was surprised by the true reason and knew nothing of the policeman, Fix, who had dogged his trail around the world in the mistaken belief that Fogg was the man who stole £55,000 from the Bank of England a few days before he set out on his journey.

I also knew nothing of Aouda who accompanies Fogg from India as I believed that his sole companion was his newly employed valet, the Frenchman Passepartout, whose name is the French for a master key which will enable you to go through any door in an establishment. Jules Verne must have spent a considerable amount of time pre-planning the trip as it is exquisitely timetabled, just how long each trip would take and how much time the travellers would have to make the next connection and how long they would have to wait if they missed such a rendezvous is all set out and is completely believable. Having sat down with railway and ship timetables to work out long over land and sea journeys in the past for my own holidays I am very aware just how complicated this could be before the age of the internet.

I loved the story, the development of the characters and the ingenious ways that Verne managed to keep them hearing ever onwards. Yes it is possible now to get round the world in less than a handful of days by simply getting on a plane, a mode of transport unavailable to Fogg back in 1873 when the novel was written and back in 1988 Michael Palin proved it was still possible to get round the world in eighty days without the use of aircraft, taking roughly the same amount of time as Fogg did in the novel. I heartily recommend this wonderful tale and I’m simply amazed that this was the first time I read it.

About the only thing I didn’t like about this Folio Society edition is the fold out map tucked into a pocket in the rear cover. It is unfortunately extremely difficult to read, which is a shame as clearly a lot of work had gone into it and it could also have been considerably improved by including a line indicating the path that Fogg and his companions took, definitely a missed opportunity there. The images in this blog were taken from the Folio Society website which I downloaded before the edition sold out and the book was removed from the site. As can be seen it is copiously illustrated with headings and tailpieces to each of the thirty seven chapters by Kristjana S Williams who also drew the map and the front cover.